With midterms a recent memory or an approaching nightmare, students have been holed up in Ellis Library or at home cramming. But the fact is, most of them will receive A’s.
Grade inflation, as defined by Merriam Webster’s Dictionary, is the assigning of grades higher than previously assigned for given levels of achievement. Ultimately, this has led to more A’s than ever.
A former Duke University geophysics professor became interested in the topic of grade inflation and created a website based on the findings of his research. According to Stuart Rojstaczer’s website, gradeinflation.com, grade inflation began in the 1960s when teachers gave higher grades to help students avoid the draft. The trend leveled off in the 1970s but began rising again in the 1980s and has been rising ever since.
A former MU professor, Max Meyer, is credited with creating the first grading curve in 1908, according to a 2002 article by Kenneth Jost in “The CQ Researcher.”
Rojstaczer said this original curve followed a bell-shaped distribution with the majority of students receiving C’s. He said today, the curve is shaped like a ski-slope with most students receiving A’s, followed by some students receiving B’s and less receiving C’s.
“It’s an artificial curve that we are imposing that assumes an A is an ordinary level of achievement,” Rojstaczer said.
An updated study by Rojstaczer cites about 43 percent of grades awarded are A’s, up from 31 percent in 1988. This raises the question, “Are students getting smarter, or are teachers grading easier?”
Rojstaczer said teachers are grading more leniently by changing their grading curves year after year.
“In a class of 100, every year they’re taking one to two B students and making them A students, and one to two C students and making them B students,” Rojstaczer said. “They’ve been doing that for 25 years now, so it adds up.”
Jost’s article suggests a “consumerist” mentality among students began in the early 1970s and can also account for the lowering of academic standards. When students view themselves as consumers, they expect above-average grades.
“I think people in this time are very entitled,” senior business major Kellie Klees said. “I feel like they think they should get everything without working for it, which is true. I mean I guess I feel like I should get A’s.”
Klees admits she doesn’t always work hard enough to get those grades.
“When I’m studying I’m like ‘Oh, I’ll be fine, I don’t really care at all,’ but then after I get my grade and I’m like, ‘Wow, I should have studied harder,'” she said. “I know it’s my fault but sometimes I ask the teachers to raise my grade.”
In Klees’ experience, however, teachers have not raised her grades, even when she was teetering on the borderline of an A and a B.
Assistant English professor Frances Dickey said she doesn’t think MU students are entitled about their grades and has never had a student complain about the grade she gave them. But when she first began teaching as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University she gave a lot of C’s because she had unrealistic expectations for her students.
“I had one enraged student kind of shake her paper at me and say, ‘I did not take an English class to get at C!'” Dickey said.
Jost’s article said faculty is often willing to comply with students’ expectations because many times, the quality of their student evaluations depends on it.
“The grades you’re getting in a class definitely colors your feeling about the professor,” Dickey said.
This was true for sophomore Tony Miriani, who gave his Beginning Painting teacher a low evaluation rating because he was upset about his low grade in the class.
“I felt I was doing a decent job for never picking up a paintbrush,” Miriani said. “And then I found out I had a C.”
Miriani said he regretted being so harsh on the evaluation after he ended up getting a B in the class.
Director of Career and Professional Development Meredith Shaw said she thinks there is incentive for professors to grade rigidly because recruiters look at how current employees from a given school are working out and use that data to determine where they recruit in the future.
“(Professors) have to put a quality product out because otherwise, companies don’t come back to hire or to invest research dollars,” Shaw said. “If we’re turning out a poor product, we lose on a lot of different fronts.”
Rojstaczer said grade inflation causes some instructors to teach less intensely.
“What happens in the classroom is that you have a low energy level because students do not have the incentive to show off their stuff and excel,” Rojstaczer said.
Shaw said 75 percent of recruiters use GPA as a first screening tool. A higher GPA allows graduates to access a larger pool of companies willing to hire them. But, she tells students that almost as important as GPA is being involved in student organizations on campus.
“Employers have told us a 4.0 student with no internships or activities is not who they want,” she said. “They’d rather have a 3.0 student who’s been in student council or steel bridge team or internships.”
Tim McIntosh, assistant director of Business Career Services, is a former recruiter for Aerotek and said GPA is a quantitative measurement that allows recruiters to compare and categorize graduates of a certain institution.
“GPA will weed it down into a smaller pool, but within that pool it’s how effectively do you communicate, how strong have you been in your leadership traits and qualities so far and how interested are you in the openings,” McIntosh said.
Dickey said she thinks grade inflation will eventually run into grade “compression” and end inflation because grades won’t be able to be pushed any higher. She said she thinks employers will just have to “read between the lines” and realize a B is no longer an impressive showing.
Matthew Hartley, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said the compression of grades at the top of the scale makes it difficult for employers and graduate schools to make “meaningful distinctions,” according to Jost’s article.
Rojstaczer said the solution must be top-down.
“In order for the problem to be mitigated, administrators have to be honest,” he said. “Right now they aren’t being honest with themselves, they’re in a state of denial, and they need to go to the faculty and say, ‘We have a problem.'”